Saturday evening with the Okigbos — three things I took home — by Osita Chidoka
Patrick and Awele Okigbo opened their home last Saturday for what became a genuinely stimulating evening—a book club, but not the performative kind. Prof Okey Ikechukwu held us to what Yuen Yuen Ang actually argued in How China Escaped the Poverty Trap.
The Chinese ambassador was in the room. The author, Prof Ang, joined by Zoom. Alongside Chichi Anigolu of the Ford Foundation, Dr Joe Abba of DAI, and Prof Abiodun Adeniyi of Baze University, the conversation had both depth and heat.
Three things I am still thinking about:
- China is on its 15th five-year plan. Every single one was delivered.
The Ambassador said this quietly, as a fact, not a boast. That restraint is itself the lesson. Nigeria does not have a planning problem. We have a finishing problem.
We announce with great fanfare and implement with great fatigue. Somewhere between the launch and delivery, accountability evaporates — and nothing meaningful happens when it does.
- Every county leader in China is a CEO with KPIs.
Not a politician counting days to the next election. A chief executive with targets, consequences, and a time horizon long enough to matter.
This is not a small difference. It determines who seeks the job, how they behave in it, and what happens if they fail. Our local government system was designed for distribution, not performance, and it behaves exactly that way.
- You cannot import institutions. You have to grow them.
This is Ang’s sharpest argument and the one we most resist. We have borrowed frameworks wholesale from Westminster, Washington, and the World Bank, and have expressed genuine surprise when they underperform.
But institutions are not neutral technology. They are the crystallised product of specific incentives, histories, and social bargains. Transplanted without those roots, they become elaborate decoration.
The hard, unglamorous work is building from the materials that actually exist here — including the incentives and power structures we prefer not to confront.
Good conversation. Good company. Good food — enough to justify showing up for the next reading.
The kind of evening that reminds you that the thinking capacity in this country is not a constraint. Deploying it is.
Thank you, Patrick and Awele, until the next one.
–Chidoka is Nigeria’s former Minister of Aviation
